I do not care what Omarosa has to say about anything, and I also don’t care that the presence of a strong black woman on the Democratic ticket is bound to cause Donald Trump to say some really racist shit. The issue has never been Trump’s racism, which few now truly deny. The issue is that Trump has revealed that this kind of racism is still an extremely potent force in American politics. The issue is that it might not actually hurt Trump’s chances if he makes really blatant racist comments. For him, it’s quite possible that the more explicitly racist he is, the better his chances.

His theory all along has been to polarize the electorate by getting as many white people as possible to vote for him based on his obvious preference for white people. It’s something I predicted would happen long before I ever contemplated that Donald Trump might be a serious candidate for president. It’s hard to believe that I wrote The GOP is Moving in the Wrong Direction over seven years ago, but it shows that I saw where things were headed.

At the time, I was responding to a piece by Benjy Sarlin on the Republicans’ refusal to work with President Obama on comprehensive immigration reform despite the fact that the Republican National Committee’s post-2012 autopsy report on Mitt Romney’s loss emphasized the need to do better with Latinos.

What Mr. Sarlin doesn’t broach is the subject of how conservatives might be able to grab a higher percentage of whites and how they might go about driving up white turnout. The most obvious way is to pursue an us vs. them approach that alternatively praises whites as the true, patriotic Americans, and that demonizes non-whites as a drain on the nation’s resources. This is basically the exact strategy pursued by McCain and especially Romney. It’s what Palin was all about, and it’s what that 47% speech was all about.

An added element was introduced by Barack Obama, whose controversial pastor and Kenyan ancestry opened up avenues for both veiled and nakedly racist appeals to the white voter. A white Democratic nominee would be less of an easy target for talk about secret Islamic sympathies and fraudulent birth certificates, but that would only make other racially polarizing arguments more necessary.

The problem is that these attacks have already been made, and they failed in even near-optimal circumstances. Accusing the Democrats of socialism, which is a race-neutral way of accusing the party of being beholden to the racial underclasses, has been proven insufficient. The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.

That is, indeed, how the party is perceived in the Deep South, but it would be criminal to expand those racial attitudes to the country at large.

The Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that will, by necessity, be more overtly racist than anything we’ve seen since segregation was outlawed.

Seen in this light, Donald Trump wasn’t an aberration but more like the logical person to fill a vaccuum that the rejection of immigration reform had created. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio represented a path that had already been rejected not just by the Republican base, but by the congressional Republicans and their leadership.

I clearly saw Trump as the fulfillment of this shift in the GOP when I wrote Trump and the Missing White Voters in December 2015. And I immediately tagged the strategy as successful in my Avoiding the Political Southification of the North piece that I wrote two days after the 2016 election. I never saw Trump as an essential feature of Trumpism, although he certainly brings his own unique flavor to things.

The Conservative Movement is fairly racist by nature, but it’s political necessity that has brought out the worst in them since 2013. They could have tacked to the middle on a host of issues, but conservatives didn’t want to budge. The fact that immigration was their biggest stumbling block is instructive, especially because we’ve seen a lot of their core beliefs fall by the wayside during Trump’s presidency. It turns out that everything was negotiable except the browning of America. The free traders and internationalists are shocked at what’s become of their old party, and the pro-military folks are appalled that Trump won’t defend our troops against Russian bounties. But this was all kind of inevitable in a way, once the party decided that it would rather polarize the white vote than reach out to non-whites. It’s a time-limited strategy, as eventually demographics will overwhelm them, but it barely worked four years ago. It could work again, but it will be much harder with a pandemic and a bad economy weighing Trump down.

It’s just sickening that it strategy still has a rational basis, even if it never had even the smallest moral one.